South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium
287 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401
phone: 843.727.2078 — fax: 843.727.2080

Two of South Florida's greatest challenges today are evacuating and sheltering residents during a giant storm.

The region's escape routes are limited. Evacuees have only two directions to drive out: north and west, along highways where massive traffic jams occur during typical rush hours. If hundreds of thousands attempt to evacuate at the last minute, many could be trapped in traffic snarls as a hurricane barrels over them.

Now emergency officials strongly advise most residents to stay home or move to a safe place nearby. "If you have to evacuate, travel the shortest distance possible—within the county if possible," said Tony Carper, director of Broward County Emergency Management Division. But most evacuees don't heed this advice. "Everybody wants to see Mickey," he said. That is, tens of thousands flock north toward Orlando and Disney World, potentially into the path of a storm that unexpectedly swerves north.

Officials also encourage evacuees to leave very early, 72 hours before a storm strikes, said Bill O'Brien, head of emergency management for Palm Beach County. Few people, though, are willing to leave three days before a storm arrives. "At 72 hours before landfall, we don't even know where the storm is going," admitted O'Brien.

The evacuation problem is most dangerous in the Florida Keys. With about 85,000 permanent residents and 50,000 visitors during storm season, the county needs 36 to 42 hours to evacuate along narrow roads to Miami-Dade County, said Billy Wagner, director of Monroe County Emergency Management. Monroe County does not have public shelters due to low elevation throughout the islands; any shelter there could be swamped by a storm surge. Nevertheless, 30,000 residents of the lower Keys, including Key West, refused to leave before Andrew. "If Andrew had hit the Keys instead of Dade County, we would've lost thousands of people," said Wagner.

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To make matters worse, some South Florida counties have cramped shelter space. Most evacuation shelters throughout Florida and the Southeast are public schools and community colleges. These buildings are supposed to be designed with a safety margin to withstand hurricanes. But "in many cases, our school facilities are not designed to withstand hurricane force winds, and therefore may not be suitable as shelters," noted a 1998 report by the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

In 1993, the Florida legislature instructed state officials to evaluate how many facilities could withstand an intense tropical cyclone. Florida has surveyed 11 counties and found that only a tiny fraction—2%—of shelters have adequate structural safety for a hurricane-prone area. State law now requires that certain areas—or "pods"—within new schools must meet tougher guidelines to resist storm pressures. But it would take many years before enough new facilities could be built to meet rising demand for shelter space, especially since dozens of school districts are resisting the 1993 requirement as a costly "unfunded mandate."

Local officials throughout Florida have failed to tell the public that most evacuation shelters do not meet current safety standards, said Erle S. Peterson, emergency recovery coordinator for Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency Management. The state evaluation of shelters "has received flak (from counties) because it's giving a dose of reality," said Peterson. "Now counties know that their shelters won't withstand wind storms, and this issue won't stay hidden very much longer."

Miami-Dade County has retrofitted some shelters to make them safer, adding shutters to windows and other measures. Despite the upgrades, though, the county has the second largest deficit of shelter space in the state. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade is not complying with the 1993 state law requiring counties to upgrade new school facilities.

So it seems wise to encourage residents, with important exceptions, to stay home as a tropical cyclone approaches. Still, this strategy has a major flaw. For more than 20 years—from the 1970s through the early 1990s—there was a steady decline in South Florida's construction quality and building code enforcement.